Coaching a math team

As far as I know, the Cayman Islands has never competed in math competitions abroad.

James writes in the blog The Math Coach:

I am going to coach a group of middle school kids math in the coming school year.

Our school is a private K-12 school located in California. The school was not very serious about math competition in the past. However, there are few students who are advanced in math and want to pursue math competition as an extra-curriculum activity. I proposed to the school administration to coach a math team with the purpose of building a math culture at the school. The math department was very receptive toward the idea.

In May, CTY organized a regional seminar titled "Educating Telated Youth through Math Competition and Problem Solving" at our school. The seminar educated parents about the benefits of learning math problem solving and participating in math competitions. It became the catalist for the formation of the math team.

Now, we have a group of 10-12 largely 7th graders eager to learn problem solving in the new school year and participate in math competitions. Mrs. M, a math teacher at the school, and I will jointly coach the team this year. I am very excited about this new journey.

Personally, I have a B.S. in Physics & Information Science, M.S. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. I taught at colledge for few years and conducted many training classes for businesses. I also taught my own kids math for many years. However, this is my first attempt in coaching middle school kids. I will be using this blog to share my experiences along the journey.

It should be exciting to follow James' experiences.